Construction on the Canal de Briare was started under Henri IV in 1604, the work stopped when the king was assassinated in 1610, only 32 years later in 1642 work was finally completed to link Montargis with Briare.

The canal links the valley of the Loing river with the valley of the Loire. It is the first canal with specially constructed feeder basins. While constructed before the Canal du Midi it already had rectangular locks. The engineers building the Canal du Midi later were not able to copy this design and used oval shaped locks.

We started our cruise on the Canal du Briare in the morning of July 28th and were planning for a full day of cruising. But again, plans are here to be changed. Around 10am heavy thunderstorms started from all directions and lightning and heavy rain made cruising not very pleasant. Betty and Pikesh went below deck and I'm not sure if they put their heads below the pillows. I already was calling Betty to let her know that we were approaching our second lock for the day when lightning struck close by and all the lights on the lock disappeared.

The lockkeeper was very helpful and put us through manually. He told us that the central computer controls for the locks were down due to a wide spread power outage and didn't give us much hope of any further locks working for the day.

So we tied up in the next town, Ouzouer-sur-Trézée, which turned up to be very pleasant. The picture shows the evening lights after another thunderstorm.